Through the Sky They Soar! The 1000 Legend Lives Again!

Cannon blasts have felled Ryu, and Luffy will not let the dragon surrender. When the Marines hurl a harpoon toward the pair, the captain snatches it from the air and whips it back, gouging into the enemy hull. Drawing up the last of his power, the dragon braces himself and roars out a summons toward the rest of his kind. That cry somehow reaches Luffy, who promises to deliver whatever Ryu wants Apis to hear.

Out near Warship Island, the surrounding waters convulse as though an earthquake were striking. The tide recedes, and a buried stretch of land breaks into view. Nami deduces that the species owes its label not to a long life but to a nesting cycle drawing the dragons home only once across a thousand years. That nest is the freshly risen island, and tucked among its coral-encased forebears sits the very Dragonite that Nelson and Eric had chased all this while.

Luffy fires off a Gum-Gum Rocket to seize the neck of a dragon soaring overhead, then drives down a Battle-Axe kick that halves Nelson's flagship and sends the panicked Marines fleeing. As the dragon's head sinks into the shallows, Apis cannot endure the sight and rejects the loss. Luffy assures her that the creatures revive at the nest, and before long a hatchling cracks out of an egg and chirps at the girl, who answers it back. A drenched Eric returns, and when Nelson greets him with a proposal, the seething swordsman strikes him down with his Devil Fruit ability while the Straw Hats watch on.

For the third occasion in this story, Luffy demonstrates the rare ability that lets him perceive the voice of all things, here understanding Ryu's parting words. A continuity error also slips through: though Devil Fruit eaters normally weaken even in shallow seawater, as Luffy later does in Chapter 752, Apis remains unaffected while standing in the shallows despite being one herself.